This is my very first Six Sentence Sunday, and I'm so excited about it.
In my novel, Meridienne Drake: Secrets of the Truth, Meridienne is discovering lots of secrets that have been kept from her all her life. Being 13--almost 14-- and about to enter high school, she just wanted to be a normal teenager. Her parents had other plans.
In the excerpt, Meridienne was trying to do something as simple as grab a book from her grandfather's library. But something else was beckoning her:
The New KDP Select
Remember when iPhones first came out. They were sold only to AT&T. As a business person, you have to wonder why just AT&T. Why not sell them at every cell phone store? Now they are at most service providers because their exclusive contract is expired.
At the time iPhones began, AT&T was not doing well. They were
struggling to compete with companies such as TMobile and Sprint. Now they are
one of the leading companies because of iPhone’s exclusivity agreement. Does
that make AT&T a better company because it has the iPhone? Not at all! Their
service is no better than it was before. Compared to my Sprint Phone, it is
always dropping calls and losing service. Do you know the last time I had a
dropped call? Well, I don’t know either.
Although I don’t have the iPhone, friends and family do. I can
tell you that my HTC EVO is much better. It has been doing things the new
iPhone has only started doing. I didn’t need the latest EVO. Mine is 2 years
old. I will be willing to bet the iPhone 5 will introduce features that my 2
year old EVO has. What is my point? My point is that just because someone does
it first, doesn’t mean someone else can’t do it better. The thing is though I would have probably
jumped on the iPhone bandwagon a long time ago if they were at SPRINT. I would
have bought every iPhone to date and assumed nothing could possibly be better.
So, this brings me to Amazon and their new program KDP Select. As quoted from the LA Times blog:
Amazon has announced KDP Select, a program that will use a new funding scheme to compensate authors who make their e-books exclusive to Amazon Kindle for at least 90 days.
The company has announced that in the first year, it expects to put $6 million into a fund that will be paid out to authors when their exclusive e-books are checked out of Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library. The authors will receive a share of the fund calculated by the proportion their books were borrowed compared to the number of borrows overall.
An author must make their book exclusive to Kindle for 90 days to be eligible for this. Why are they doing this? Easy. To encourage more Kindle sales.
The Nook Tablet is now out. It is doing really well, so Amazon
needs to make a move. The move was to get exclusive rights on ebooks. Some
people might be thinking it’s to encourage the Lending Library. In a small way
it is, but the Lending Library was created in the first place because all other
ereaders can borrow books directly from their city libraries. Having exclusive
rights on ebooks ensures to Amazon that they will have more books than the
other ereaders. Plain and simple. They are AT&T. The Kindle was no longer
better, so they needed a new strategy. Is it wrong? No, it’s business. They are
enticing author’s exclusivity for an unguaranteed, seemingly large amount of
money. Is it worth it? Maybe. It won’t guarantee you money. It may give you
more exposure, but what about the lost sales from B&N or iPad. Perhaps for
book releases, this might be something to entertain. A new release comes out 3 months
early just on Kindle and then put it for sale elsewhere. To me though, there
are other ways to get free marketing without sacrificing the availability of my ebook to all platforms. My fans are more than just on the Kindle. I couldn't say, "Well, you can read my new release just because you have a Kindle." Even more so, I wouldn't want to tell another fan, "Even though you are a loyal fan, you can't read my new release until three months from now because you don't have a Kindle." But these are just my thoughts. What's yours?
Lots of <3,